Animation can be a wonderful art form, _but_ the main reason why Japanese Anime has become popular TV fare for children in the USA is neither because the Anime programs in question are "genuinely stellar works of art...worth analyzing" nor because American boys & parents have suddenly developed a love of things Japanese (the youngest kids probably don't even know that they are made in Japan). It's because "[a]n average 'Pokemon' episode costs about $100,000; the average cost of an original episode of an American-made cartoon is estimated to be about $500,000....Anime cartoons are so much cheaper because they are more simply animated than their American cousins -- their halting style requires fewer actual drawings per episode. Further, most anime programs have already been produced for Japanese television, which takes the burden of the initial production costs off of the domestic network that buys it. The low cost and high ratings of 'Pokemon,' especially among boys, were exactly what the WB, Fox and Cartoon Network were looking for. The anime shows fit not only their ratings needs but also those of increasingly niche-oriented advertisers hoping to sell boys on action figures -- many based on the anime programs themselves -- cereals and snack foods" (Jim Rutenberg, "Violence Finds a Niche in Children's Cartoons," _New York Times_ 28 January 2001: Sec. 1, Pg. 1).
With the exception of the recent surge in popularity of cheap Japanese Anime & HK movies (+ longer-standing audiences for Brit Pop & so-called "world music"), the American cultural markets are as resistant to imports as ever.
A couple of years ago, I showed Fassbinder's _The Marriage of Maria Braun_ to my students in one of my courses. One of the students complained to me that the characters mainly spoke German & the film had subtitles....
Will the "modernist canon," be it literary or cinematic, survive in America? It won't, left simply to the market & "education" reduced to the status of a consumer product. With regard to Jazz, Justin wrote a while ago: "I promote it because I hope to get other people as excited about this wonderful stuff as I am, and to help keep it around in a living form." I feel the same way about cinema & literature. It's a tremendous loss to today's college students that most of them will float through higher education without being exposed to the best of the modernists on the Left (or the Right for that matter), as well as other canonical works of cinema, literature, philosophy, etc. In contrast, even without Dennis Robert Redmond promoting Japanese Anime & video games, many of them have already been immersed in them. Why champion _what the market has already given them in quantities_, when there are works & traditions that _might die or become at best museum pieces_ without passionate advocacy on the part of everyone who has learned something from them?
The ruling class & governing elite want you to watch TV, analyze cheap Japanese Anime, & do "cultural studies." The ruling class & governing elite want to keep the best of the humanities to their children alone (upon whom good & expensive education is generally wasted), consigning working-class children to vocational training (even at four-year colleges & universities) plus a little bit of "media literacy" which helps them develop a properly ironic attitude to _all_ forms of authority, legitimate or illegitimate, & hence become disinclined to stir themselves in the hope of making a political difference.
Yoshie
P.S. As for moralism, there is nothing more moralistic than Anime made for children (& bad old Westerns perhaps).